And then suddenly another tunnel opened in the light, the tunnel of a man, a ghost treading the backlit moonwater, drifting through the increasing storm.
I tried to convince myself it was the owl coming back, making another pass. Even if I’d been able to believe it my skin knew different, tighten-ing all over me so that my scalp prickled and my scrotum actually shrank. But I didn’t run, didn’t even take a step, just stood there with my arms around the bundled hammock and waited, getting rained on.
The figure coming up the driveway was clearly a thing too sorrowful to be alive, it was a black absence, the ash of grief, a lost, wounded soul, but was now clearly, as it came even with me, heading right for the pond, a man walking. He got within ten yards of me. I could almost see his face. Still he seemed unconnected with our earth, had nothing to do at the moment with our violent dramas, not even with the taste of rain on the wind changing to a drink, not even with the strands of it thrown against the side of the barn and the sheds as he passed. There was something special about his stroll, as if he were exploring a place once thought familiar but now completely new — like a youth on his first day of hooky, for whom simply walking inside this stolen holiday is exotic and monstrous, and everything — this is what it is about hooky, and about this figure’s emanations — everything is original because it’s been chosen. Yes, he gave the
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impression of being somebody who’d rejected the routine forced on him and decided just to walk on the surface of the world, a pilgrim. We see them by the roadside, particularly on the coast, solitary unburdened travellers. They’re probably crazy, that’s true, but we have no way of knowing. Enlightened ones may live everywhere among us, looking like functional failures. This might have been the ghost of one of those.
There was nothing troubling about this presence; this apparition was emphatic but not desperate, also unhurried but not at leisure. It was passing along the edge of my life and I felt no fear. Only a hunger — I ached to discover what gift he’d been given. Because clearly he carried some treasure in his heart, some powerful token from the true universe.
Nothing got in his way, the shrivelled clumps of fern in the pasture, the hunks of log and metal, the haggish sculptures — he’d withdrawn any investment in these things, they weren’t quite contemporary with his purpose. He never looked right or left. His every step had the quality of a stirring finish, of bursting through the tape. He walked right into the pond. At the edge of the bank he spread his arms like wings and took a great step out into the air. In the banshee squall his landing in the water was inaudible, not quite real. And then I got it — I was witnessing somebody in his ultimate moment. For him, the planet, and its ponds and such, didn’t count. A deep preoccupation was making him invulnerable to the elements. He would stride on the floor of the water for its whole width, two hundred feet, and burst onto the facing bank like a military vehicle and head straight on, dismembering the pitiful trees, I was convinced of it. I didn’t realize, until I took a deep, damp lungful, that I’d stopped breathing. Now I dropped the hammock at my feet. I was soaked. The rain ran off the ends of my fingers. And it whipped across the surface of the pond in sheets, covering any trace of him. But I could see him better, now that he was gone — I was seeing the person I can’t be. The one who marches to the bottom of the depths, who beats his bullshit ruminations into a sword and hacks at life’s entanglements until he’s free. He’d come bursting up out of the water in just a minute, like a baptismal figure…
I realized as the minute and then another passed that I was crazy, this guy was drowning, anybody would, it’s the natural result of breathing underwater. I shouted! — but naturally he didn’t hear. He was gone. He was now without action, he’d passed into the under-58 / Denis Johnson
world of drowned souls — who would he rescue there?…No, I had to be him, I had to rescue him, call him back from the dead. I had to be the person I couldn’t be. I swear to you that this was the level of my thoughts and feelings, I was inhabiting the realm of the gods and heroes, this person had truly inspired me. I ran inside the front door and cut on the porch lamps, which lit up the yard and the dirt walk and hardly fingered the edge of the pond; raced back out into a scene completely changed by their illumination — the rain around the bulb, the crinkling and rustling of it on the pond as I plunged toward the water — this night! — wings, sorrows, iridescences, wounds, exile, the owl, the mist, the moon, dew’s light-emitting diodes on the webs — the blow to my guts as the water went over me. I could feel my eyes punched against their orbits, a seizure, a response of some electric force that shot strength out even to the ends of my fingers, even into my fingernails, as I splashed in a half panic, struggling for my own life now, no longer god, hero, not even human, more the mindless raccoon stalked by the dog of death, plunging out into anything. I couldn’t stay afloat. I kicked off my shoes and tore off my sweater, sinking below the surface as I wrestled it over my head. I came up again. My limbs were going numb in the chilly water and I was surprised that it was happening so quickly.
I forgot what I was here for. In one direction I saw nothing but the porch lamps, the other way lay an acre of water in a world of darkness, sizzling in the rain. I was afraid.
Then he surfaced just ahead of me, modestly, without thunder — so unlike me, so much wiser, not struggling at all, unconscious and beautiful. I grabbed his sleeve and pulled him easily to the shallows, but dragging him up out of the water was murder. The world became terrible and slow. I fell backward. All I had out of the water was his arm.
The rest of him drifted like a log. He seemed past saving. I even thought, winded, nauseous with fatigue, of giving up, letting him float away.
But I pulled him up the bank an inch at a time, resting between inches, until we were both stretched out in the mud. I’m saving this person! — but I’m so drained I can only lie beside him, just as helpless, the only difference being that I’m breathing and he’s not. All I can think of is turning him over and putting my lips on his. All I want to do is breathe into his death. But I can’t move. If I don’t, I myself will drown in the flood. I can see it rushing down at me, stupendous, wobbling globes. I turned onto my belly, got my hands and Already Dead / 59
knees beneath me and crawled over to look down at his face — he had a long mustache, and a pair of eyeglasses snagged on his left ear. Mud dripped from my face onto his but there was no response, no breath, no pain or trouble there. He was dead! Complete! Mysterious forever!
I’d heard of pinching the nostrils shut, tilting back the head, clearing the passages of obstructions, but heard about them it seemed in a foreign language I had to decipher now, in the act. Water ran out of his mouth when I turned his head to the side. I rolled him halfway over and he vomited into the mud — alive! Over on his back once more and I put my wide-open mouth over his. The fear ran out of me again and I entered another clear space in which I felt the rain washing us both until we were beautiful. We breathed. He tasted like vomit, but good, like my own when I’m very sick with wine and I know this purging is the cure.